Introduction

Checker is a tool that looks for common problems with recordings for LibriVox, a site where volunteers collaborate to make audio books of public domain texts. The Checker tool can save you time by checking your file for common issues before you go to the trouble of uploading it.

To use Checker, drag and drop one or more MP3 files (or a folder or ZIP archive that contains them) onto the Checker window and allow it to analyze them. Once it is done, click on any file to see a report of any issues that were detected. The report will either state that the file "passed" (no problems were detected), or it may list a number of errors or warnings. Errors generally indicate more serious problems that should be fixed before uploading the file. A warning is a less serious problem, or in some cases a potential problem that Checker is not sure about.
What does Checker Check?

The program checks many technical features about your file. It can find problems with file name conventions, metadata (ID3 tags), audio format and MP3 encoding options, volume, and more. Checker has also been designed with extensibility in mind, so other programmers can easily add new tests (or modify the existing ones) in the future.

It does not check the content of the recording: it won't tell you if you've read a word incorrectly or criticize your performance.
Download

Once you have Java 6 installed, you can download Checker and run it by double clicking the downloaded file. (For OS X, it is recommended that you download and unzip the separate OS X version.)

IMPORTANT: the Checker application is currently in alpha release. Some features may be missing or incomplete (notably the help information), and the sensitivity of some tests may be off.

Getting Started

If you are using the experimental version, see the readme.txt file in the ZIP file for instructions.

Windows: Download and run the installer as you would any other Windows software. If you get an error message when you try to run the program, you probably don't have Java installed. See below for help.

OS X: Download the .zip file and double-click it to open. Then drag the Checker icon into your Applications folder to install it.

Other: Download and unzip the JAR file. On most platforms, you can double-click the JAR file to run it. If that doesn't work for you, you can it start it from the shell using a line like: java -jar checker.jar

Java Help

Checker was written in the Java language, so it will run on all of the most popular platforms, including Windows, Linux and OS X. It works best with version 6 of Java, or newer, but it will also run under version 5 with reduced functionality.

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